A Land of Aching Hearts

The Middle East in the Great War

Leila Tarazi Fawaz

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780674735491
• eBook ISBN: 9780674744912
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The Great War transformed the Middle East, bringing to an end four hundred years of Ottoman rule in Arab lands while giving rise to the Middle East as we know it today. A century later, the experiences of ordinary men and women during those calamitous years have faded from memory. A Land of Aching Hearts traverses ethnic, class, and national borders to recover the personal stories of the civilians and soldiers who endured this cataclysmic event.

Among those who suffered were the people of Greater Syria—comprising modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine—as well as the people of Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt. Beyond the shifting fortunes of the battlefield, the region was devastated by a British and French naval blockade made worse by Ottoman war measures. Famine, disease, inflation, and an influx of refugees were everyday realities. But the local populations were not passive victims. Fawaz chronicles the initiative and resilience of civilian émigrés, entrepreneurs, draft-dodgers, soldiers, villagers, and townsmen determined to survive the war as best they could. The right mix of ingenuity and practicality often meant the difference between life and death.

The war's aftermath proved bitter for many survivors. Nationalist aspirations were quashed as Britain and France divided the Middle East along artificial borders that still cause resentment. The misery of the Great War, and a profound sense of huge sacrifices made in vain, would color people's views of politics and the West for the century to come.

CHAPTER ONE

A Changing Middle East

AS THE SUN rose on the imperial capital city of Vienna on Saturday, May 20, 1882, a fresh day beckoned the laborers, merchants, and officials slumbering in their beds on the right bank of the majestic Danube. Unbeknownst to them—and secret even to the diplomatic milieu of late nineteenth-century Europe—the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister and the German and Italian representatives to Vienna were busy finalizing an agreement that would reshape the European security architecture. For as the sun set that day on that epicenter of European intrigue, espionage, and diplomacy, the three diplomats committed their governments to a newly created Triple Alliance. The savvy first chancellor of the German Reich, Otto von Bismarck, exulted at the agreement, “No one will dare to measure himself with the Teuton fury which is manifested in case of an attack.”¹

Even so, the signing of the Triple Alliance may have distracted Berlin, Vienna, and Rome from a perhaps even more important geopolitical event occurring that very day 2,200 kilometers to the south. For on May 20, 1882, British and French warships arrived off the coast of Alexandria in the warm waters of the eastern Mediterranean, ostensibly to protect the Egyptian khedive, Tawfiq Pasha, from the revolt of Colonel Ahmad Urabi, in rebellion in part over pay and other disparities between Europeans and Egyptians.² Seven weeks later, after rioters in Alexandria killed dozens of Europeans, the fleet moved into action, unleashing a massive reprisal on the city. Amid the destruction, Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s forces rushed ashore, and with their superior technology, destroyed Urabi’s fledgling forces at the battle of Tall al-Kabir, restored the khedive, and garrisoned the country. Thus the great crown jewel of the Arab world, Egypt and the Suez, was added to Queen Victoria’s already studded imperial diadem, an arrangement formalized in December 1914 after the outbreak of World War I.

That historic spring day combined great-power politics and political colonialism across multiple continents, two dynamics that fed decades of tensions from which the Arab world is still reeling. But occasionally overlooked is that the British action that day both served and depended upon technological superiority made possible by economic dominance. Although the Middle East of 1882 was part and parcel of a rapidly accelerating and globalizing world, European economic dominance and political expansion collided regularly with Middle Eastern development to yield an imbalanced relationship in favor of the great European powers.

European political colonialism nipped hard at the heels of the rapid economic changes that characterized the nineteenth-century Middle East. While to the rioters in Alexandria the world was still closer to what it had been for centuries than to what it would become, the pace of change in their lifetimes was unlike any other period preceding it. The Industrial Revolution drove that change, as Middle Easterners experienced the West in a decidedly new capacity.

Rulers and ruled, sultans and subjects, empire and province, millets and guilds, these were still the familiar dichotomies that defined life in the late nineteenth century, as they had for centuries before it. It was a world in which family, clan, village, or city quarter dominated one’s worldview rather than larger social or political affiliations, and where a limited and predictable circle of relatives, friends, business partners, and acquaintances took precedence over distant events in distant lands.³ And yet the integration of the Middle East into the world economy, and the social, cultural, and political disruption it caused, loosened expectations that had been moored to centuries of tradition. Again, at the heart of that process stood the Industrial Revolution.

The European industrial breakthrough powered the Middle East toward modernity as nothing else could have done so comprehensively. The arrival of steam navigation on the eastern Mediterranean coast, the consequent reorientation of markets so that trade with different parts of Asia and Africa became less central than trade with Europe, the integration of the region into a Western-dominated economy in the course of the century, the attraction of rural and other populations to the new centers of exchange and productivity, the growth of a merchant community eager and able to participate in the new opportunities at hand, all led to a reshuffling of business and traditional life. The Western-dominated economic system overwhelmed many processes of traditional exchange. It lessened the isolation of different parts of the region, but it also altered the balance between areas drawn into the new economy and others where crops did not matter to the export trade or where artisanal handicrafts became redundant in the face of new manufactured imports from Europe.

These changes in economic patterns invariably reshaped the constellation of economic power in the Arab provinces. Some previously remote regions shed their isolation and were assimilated into the burgeoning global economy, while others writhed and chafed under the economic revolution. By the twentieth century, the Middle East was exporting a variety of raw materials, led by cotton, while importing finished manufactured goods, especially cotton textiles. The diversity in exports reflected the rich Ottoman mosaic—raw silk constituted almost one quarter of Greater Syria’s exports, while cotton blanketed the ports of Egypt and Turkestan.⁴ Sugar, coffee, tea, and grain complemented those dominant twin commodities of Middle Eastern trade bound for Liverpool, Marseilles, Trieste, and the other great ports of Europe.

Even more directly, Middle Eastern rulers allowed European public and private investors into vast cross-sections of the economy. After decades of fiscal challenges, they surrendered an elaborate system of exclusive economic concessions for road, telegraph, port, and railway development to Europe. Although intended to revitalize a woeful economic base and reinvigorate the struggling Ottoman economy, these monopolistic arrangements invited European “financiers, merchants, physicians, skilled workers, and the adventurers of all sorts who joined a gold rush.”⁵

Europeans held controlling stakes in enterprises ranging from public utilities (gas, electricity, and water) to public transport (riverboats and streetcars), mining, and manufacturing. With the exception of Egypt, the Sudan, and an extension into the Arabian desert, Europeans owned and operated every major railway connecting the interior to the coast. But European dominance did not end at the coastal railhead; port and shipping facilities were similarly controlled by European interests, as were the banking sectors financing the trading cycle. And in the early twentieth century, in perhaps their most enduring legacy, Europeans began drilling for petroleum in Iran while Egyptian wells had entered into production by the outbreak of World War I. Indeed, from acquisition to sale, the complete life cycle of virtually every major economic activity in the broader Middle East was dominated and financed by Europe.⁶

Of course, as four years of war would make clear, Europe was not a monolithic political entity. The great powers managing the delicate post-Napoleonic balance in Europe acted with foresight in establishing spheres of influence in Asia and Africa. In varying degrees, the Germans, French, and British struggled for power in the Ottoman capital at Istanbul;⁷ the Belgians, French, and British controlled Egypt; the Russians and British eyed Iran; and the French pressured the Levant. Most directly, the French occupied Algeria in 1830, established a Tunisian protectorate in 1881, and a Moroccan one in 1912. A joint British, French, Italian, and Russian condominium established control over Crete in 1898, followed by an Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 that was completed the following year. By the eve of World War I, the Mediterranean Sea had been reduced to a European lake.

This European political and economic penetration jolted territories controlled by essentially the same Ottoman dynasty for centuries. For four hundred years, from the early sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, much of the Arab world was ruled from Istanbul as part of the Ottoman Empire. Spanning thirty-six sultans, the empire had humble origins, stemming from a Turkish principality that had been converted to Sunni Islam. These early Ottomans swept across the Eurasian steppes and into the Anatolian heartland, sensing weakness in the aging Byzantine Empire. Over the centuries, this incipient Ottoman Empire transformed into a full-fledged intercontinental force, conquering territories from southeastern Europe to southwestern Asia. In the process, its capital moved from Bursa in northwestern Anatolia in 1326 to Edirne in eastern Thrace in 1366 to Constantinople in 1453. The sacking of Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, completed the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, and with it, the last vestige of the Roman Empire. At its peak in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire extended from Algeria to Azerbaijan and from central Europe to central Africa. Twice, in 1529 and in 1683, Ottoman armies besieged Vienna.

Rebuffed at Vienna after centuries of expansion but still straddling three continents, the Ottoman Empire turned to internal consolidation in the face of regional rebellions. Even so, as late as the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire still weighed heavily on the European balance of power through its Balkan presence. To maintain the empire’s heavyweight status alongside a rapidly modernizing Europe, the Ottomans decided to implement a massive reorganization, known as the Tanzimat reforms. Although launched earlier by reforming Sultans, this Western-style modernization was officially proclaimed in November 1839; it sought to counter centrifugal forces, including European meddling, with centripetal reforms. In practice, this meant permanent Ottoman vigilance in Ottoman Europe, where secessionist sentiment had already seized Serbia and the Peloponnese (via the 1821–1832 Greek War of Independence), and in the Ottoman Middle East, which generally remained more tolerant of Istanbul’s rule.

Accompanying this political centralization were economic investments in public security and infrastructure, most visibly the five-year-long construction of a railway connecting Damascus and Medina, completed in 1908. Long-distance transport before the nineteenth century often required laborious treks by animal carriage across kilometers of desert. Traders may have enjoyed the luxury of the navigable Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and in Greater Syria merchants could hug the Mediterranean coastline, but most interior geographies dependent on the caravan trade could not be connected to the Mediterranean before the nineteenth century’s sudden advancements in transportation infrastructure.

The steamboat charged into Middle Eastern ports in the 1830s, changing the pace, pattern, and potential of international trade, and in the second half of the century railways created new links between distant cities—one could now travel from Alexandria to Cairo via Suez, from Konya to Basra via Baghdad, from Scutari to Ankara across the Bosporus, from Izmir to the Anatolian hinterland, and from Damascus to the Hijaz. Although the motorcar remained relatively rare—roadways were generally neglected—a major road facilitating expansion in trade by linking the Syrian rural interior to the Mediterranean trading coast was completed in 1863.⁸

As European demand increased, camel caravans crisscrossed the Syrian and Saharan deserts, railways rolled through rural regions, and ships steamed the Suez in larger numbers and with greater frequency. This voluminous growth in trade directly affected peasants. For while merchants and financiers directed trade from metropolitan hubs, that commerce directly determined the scope and scale of cultivation in the interior. Between 1860 and 1914, the allure of profit steadily encroached on nomadism. In Egypt, the insatiable European demand for raw cotton led businessmen to double the amount of land apportioned to cotton cultivation. In Syria and Mesopotamia, similar market forces incentivized the mass production of grain, olives, oil, and sesame seeds; in Mount Lebanon, the commodity of choice was raw silk.

These dual pillars of Ottoman modernization and European globalization quickly spilled from the economic and political to the social and cultural spheres. In particular, they reshaped the social composition of the countryside and cities. Advances in public health, including in battling contagious diseases, resulted in rapid population expansion throughout the century, most notably in the cities.⁹ Istanbul and Cairo, the glittering capital of the Empire and the largest Arab city, respectively, benefited disproportionally from these improvements.

The port cities prospered most in this era of seaborne trade, rail navigation, and improving public health. At the top was Alexandria, dominating the Egyptian cotton trade and long the second largest city in the Arab world. A confident Beirut also grew steadily, until it dominated the Syrian coast as its main port. Izmir, the principal pivot of the Aegean region and a major Mediterranean outlet, expanded its port in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; not long thereafter, in 1901, Istanbul and Salonika undertook similar port renovations and expansions. From Casablanca to Algiers and Tunis, booming North African ports rapidly expanded their commercial activities. Basra, situated along the Shatt al Arab waterway in Mesopotamia, linked the Gulf to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Ships rounding the Arabian peninsula into the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal, past the teeming ports of Aden, Jedda, Suez, and Port Said, were gliding through one seamless maritime trading corridor from the Arabian to the Mediterranean Seas.

These ports became the dominant centers of finance and trade, import and export, and politics and authority in the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the Middle East, infrastructure upgrades were prioritized to accommodate the mercantilist export of raw materials and the importation of finished products. The dredging and expansion of ports facilitated the docking of ever larger vessels, while the somewhat erratic expansion of road networks connected the coast to the interior. Alongside these transportation networks, telegraph and postal services linked communications between subregions and regions as never before.¹⁰ As cities strained under the weight of new populations, municipalities were established to administer affairs, leading to the planning and construction of sewage systems in Alexandria and Cairo in the first decade of the new century.¹¹

The magnetic allure of opportunity easily outshone the dangers of growing crime, leading to expanding urbanization. Since land transport was relatively undeveloped, the cities of the interior struggled to keep pace with their coastal cousins. By the twentieth century, the port cities of the eastern ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on Transliteration
• Note on Exchange Rates
• Maps
• Introduction: Everyday Heroes
• 1. A Changing Middle East
• 2. The Empire at War
• 3. Living the Great War
• 4. Entrepreneurs and Profiteers
• 5. The Soldiering Experience
• 6. South Asians in the War
• 7. Cooperation and Disaffection
• Epilogue: War Memory
• Illustrations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index